“The irony is not lost on me, that I could never have been at the AAR conference in person. Travelling to conferences as a disabled student is getting more and more difficult… I blog so that I can share my developing ideas in a forum that is actually accessible to me.”
Photo: Newspaper on a tube seat. Headline reads “20,000 a day start a blog”. CC Annie Mole, flickr.
Should postgraduate researchers blog?
“Under normalcy, no one is or can be normal, just as no one is or can be equal. All have to work hard to make it seem like they conform, and so the person with disabilities is singled out as a dramatic case of not belonging. This identification makes it easier for the rest to think they fit the paradigm.”
– Lennard Davis, ‘Bodies of Difference: Politics, Disability, and Representation’
Some things have got me thinking more deeply recently about accessibility in academia.
“Ethically, I believe that emancipatory work and social justice should be at the heart of everything we are doing – and that goes for people outside and inside the academy.”
Image: students at a student support centre. Picture by University of Nottingham, Creative Commons, flickr.
I have an article up at the PhDisabled blog, about the media debate currently going over student mental health services in the UK and how they are overstretched and underfunded.
Image: the Lego Research Institute. Adorable lego researchers with a dinosaur, a microscope, a telescope and other research equipment. Image from the Lego Shop.
In the beginning, I was over-ambitious. When I wrote this post, I firmly believed that my research should be shaped by disabled people who are involved with churches, rather than just by me. I wanted to do a two-stage research project, beginning by talking to as many disabled Christians as possible, and asking them to shape the second stage of the research with me. I hoped that they could be my co-researchers, or at least very active participants, rather than just research ‘subjects’. Continue Reading
Rise in university applications slows amid fears about degree costs | The Guardian
This is an interesting one. A market research company has asked current students whether they would have gone to university if they’d had to pay £9000 fees. Around half of students surveyed say that they would not have done. Continue Reading
